Setting Up a Training Strategy for Your Employees

Although the US economy has recovered and unemployment is the lowest since 2008 at 5.1%, employees still share several common complaints. One of the complaints involves the lack of training in corporate America. According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, 35% of participants maintain that increased training and learning opportunities would motivate them to stay with an employer. Companies have preached the need for trainable and teachable employees who can master new skills quickly. This sentiment may be shared by employees and companies, but managers, directors, and executives must create training strategies to acclimate new employees and to further their development as a means of promoting success.

Three popular and effective training strategies are used in most industries and careers. These three systems include instructor-lead training, web-based training, and hybrid training. Hybrid training involves a combination of instructor-lead training and web-based training, which breaks up the potential monotony of many corporate-training programs.

Instructor-lead training is often helpful because the facilitator usually knows the job requirements, skills, company culture, and desired performance outcomes very well. In addition to these general competencies, the facilitator should also be charismatic and engaging since corporate-training classes can last anywhere from 4 to 12 weeks; as a result, you want to make sure the training instructor can master the material and keep the attention of anxious new-hires for the entire time. However, few employees are fully qualified to serve as facilitators for instructor-lead training while keeping the material fresh and the class interested. As a result, training programs can quickly become outdated and dry without constant analysis and feedback from participants and instructors.

Web-based training is much more interactive and can reach each trainee on several levels. Web-training usually offers examples, samples, and opportunities to test the trainee’s knowledge of several concepts while evaluating his or her progress. Web-based training is often highly customizable as well, but it also can involve several risks. Sometimes technology can fail, and the training environment may be plain or lacking excitement. As a result, it is important to update the web-based training environment and to offer new features to stimulate the trainees’ attention. Many companies find it helpful to integrate gamification – that is, gaming techniques and concepts for additional challenge through healthy competition.

Understanding the purpose of your training program can help to determine the best strategy and system of training that will give you immediate ROI. Here are several points to consider when designing your training strategies:
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Who is being trained?

New employees

Older employees

Frontline employees

Managers

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What type of training?

Skills

Ethics

Leadership

Systems training

Business analysis

If this list seems overwhelming, do not worry. There is help available to assist you with creating better and more relevant training programs. Skill assessments not only improve your company’s talent recruitment and candidate selection, but also employee training. These training assessment tools allow you to evaluate and screen your employees’ training needs, as well as identify the relevant positions and accommodate skill levels. You can use assessments to identify a skills gap and to assist with benchmarking for employee-succession planning.

Amidst so many changes in technology and consumer tastes, companies have to pay attention to emerging themes and must deliver top-level service to their clients and customers. Although workers may be more skilled than in the past, they are also demanding more training to keep up with the marketplace innovations and career development needs. To be an industry-leading organization, you must be able to sustain growth, which is made possible by making useful and engaging training resources available to all employees.

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Chris Fields is an HR professional and expert resume writer with more than 13 years of experience as a former practitioner and current HR consultant. He is the curator of two websites: CostofWork.com and ResumeCrusade.com, and contributes HR-focused content to many others, including PerformanceICreate.com, eSkill.com and SmartRecruiters.com.

There are work fields that require constant training, as the market itself is developing rapidly. I believe web-based training is appropriate in those situations, or external classes held by experts in those fields would be good too. All employees want to be trained by the best or attend the best classes, but before paying for them, there should be rules about how to arrange for the training. Listing the needs of the position and the needs of each employee is mandatory in order to establish what is worth paying for and what is not. I also like the idea of evaluating your employee’s gaps in knowledge and thus being able to point them out and fix them.

The demand for constant training and development is absolutely normal in today’s world. Training your employees will not only benefit them, but it will also benefit the company in the long run. The better prepared your people are, the higher the quality of their work. Since training costs time and money, each manager should study the options available inside or outside the company, and compare the costs and quality to obtain the maximum ROI. Constant development in a dynamic market is like breathing. If you update your products to fit your customers, you should do the same with your employees.

Yes, I am using training assessment tools, and they make our job much easier when it comes to decide which training goes with which employee. We strive to be up to date with everything that is new out there, but for that, our employees must be at the same level as well. So organizing training, whether instructor-led or web-based, should be a must in every organization if they wish to keep their employees interested and performing at their best.

Kristin Kelley

VP of Marketing and Communications, Randstad Technologies

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Christa Foley

Recruiting Manager Zappos

“The wide variety and customizability of eSkill’s online testing allows us to pre-screen many of our candidates before they even get to our doors. And this is a key factor, because once a potential hire shows he/she possesses the skills necessary to do the job, our recruiters can concentrate on the second—and equally important—part of the [...]